Wednesday, November 27, 2013

List Makers' Delight

A Christmas list is like
Christmas candy.When the holiday
is over, I still want some.Luckily, January is a list maker’s delight.I can throw away the old lists and make new ones!

My friends claim that my
need for lists is a sign of a clinical depression or OCD or a need for control
or some such.So I made a list of
medical conditions that people talk about wrong:

·Lactose
intolerance

·Sudden leg-jerk
syndrome

·Facial
recognition phasia – really mean she saw you but is ignoring you so you won’t
ask her again to borrow money

Once I decided to stop
making lists, even grocery lists.I found I list the needed groceries anyhow, but I purposely leave the
list at home to punish myself.

Many people are list makers
and don’t admit it. Doctors make lists, but they call them categories to sound
smart. Librarians are major players. They have lists of compendiums that list
the number of specific old books still extant. There’s a cry for help.

So I made a list of list
makers:

·Starbucks
employees

·Airline pilots

·Writers on
Amazon – all want to get listed with Kindle 100 best free books

·Efficiency
experts

·Anybody in
sports (but they call the lists stats to avoid sounding domestic)

Website designers are list
makers, trying to draw order out of chaos. “Okay, everybody talks, but one at a
time and 140 characters only!”

The internet is list
nirvana. Google is basically a list with most visited first. Goodreads has a
section titled Listopia. I limit my time there from 7-9pm as an act of personal
discipline.

My need for lists is
satisfied with students. I list the grades I think each will get, then the
final grades they actually earned with the variance and frequency. Aaahhhh, I
love teaching.

The only group that cannot
seem to make a quality list is healthcare.gov.

So I say, list makers stand
proud. There are more of us that can be counted.